E. Paul Zehr

On his book Inventing Iron Man: The Possibility of a Human Machine

Cover Interview of November 25, 2011

In a nutshell

Inventing Iron Man is a kind of sequel to my earlier book Becoming Batman. That book was about asking how far can our biology take us toward the performance of the ultimately-trained Batman. With Inventing Iron Man the focus is on amplifying human ability with technology and the very question of how we interface with all our technology in the first place.

We have some pretty clunky interfaces (I am using one right now—it’s called a “keyboard”) when we use technology. If the Iron Man suit of armor existed we would never be able to control it with the conventional ways we use technology. Instead I suggest that the Iron Man suit would need to be directly connected to the brain and spinal cord of the user. It would have to be the most complex “brain machine interface” ever developed.

I illustrate this concept using ideas about how the nervous system works, and how things can adapt and change as a result of changes in activity. There really are fewer bigger changes in activity than riding around in an articulated, instrumented, and motorized suit of high-tech armor connected directly to your mind.

Spontaneous generation is one of those wrong theories that clutter the basements of the biological sciences and that now look so very obviously wrong that it is hard to see how anyone could have taken them seriously in the first place. Why wouldn’t it occur to anyone that flies might be laying eggs that were too small for us to see? How simple would the crucial experiment be? What I have tried to do in much of my work is to turn this ‘obvious wrongness’ on its head—why, exactly, does it seem so obviously wrong?—and see what the new picture that emerges from that inquiry says about science and our belief in its results.Daryn Lehoux, Interview of November 13, 2017

It’s commonplace to say that humor is subjective, since what’s funny to you might not be funny to me. But humor is also a loaded concept. If you – or your people – have no sense of humor, or the wrong one, that means you’re less rational, tolerant, understanding, or civilized. You don’t get it. Or, worse, you lack something human. Modern Chinese debates about humor were very much caught up with these fundamental questions of value.Christopher Rea, Interview of October 26, 2016